to stamp a name on it, you can call it New Florida, New World, or Floribbean, but it is not so easily categorized.
The top of the dining pyramid is the domain of the Mango Gang, a loose group of innovators who invented New Florida cuisine, a casual fusion of the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and Middle America. The big three are Allen Susser (of the elegant Chef Allen's in Aventura), rising national star Norman Van Aken (Norman's in Coral Gables) and Mark Militello (whose flagship Mark's Place has closed, but who now has the stunning and popular Mark's Las Olas in nearby Fort Lauderdale). These are the proving grounds and showcases for the best and most adventurous of the New Florida cuisine.
Yet the bottom of the pyramid, restaurants where you can dine for ten dollars or so, offers culinary adventures, as well. Little Havana, the neighborhood just west of downtown Miami, has the greatest concentration of Cuban restaurants in the United States, mostly rock-bottom budget places where you can gorge yourself on palomilla steak (sirloin marinated in garlic and lime juice, pounded thin and quickly fried), sweet fried plantains, and black beans and rice. A shining example (literally; just wait until you see the mirrors and chandeliers) is Versailles, where the tuxedoed wait staff applies the highest standards of service to the delivery of your six-dollar platter of ropa vieja (shredded beef in a savory tomato sauce).
Coral Gables' reputation for fine dining is the best in metropolitan Miami. In the heart of the Gables, a mix of charming Mediterranean architecture and futuristic office buildings, are dozens of superbly run restaurants with impeccable service and a dressy feel. In addition to Norman's, highlights include Giacosa, perhaps the area's best Italian restaurant, and The Heights, a spinoff of Pacific Time, Jonathan Eismann's bastion of Asian Rim cooking in South Beach. Where Pacific Time has a light, fish-oriented menu, The Heights takes a heartier, more Middle American approach.
Waiter from the Blue Door ready to serve.
A typical South Beach restaurant-very fun and noisy.
If it's down-home cooking you're looking for, one of the Gables' most popular eateries is the Biscayne Miracle Mile, a cafeteria specializing in Southern soul food. Put the Mile's 85-cent collard greens up against most $7.95 salads in a blind taste test, and you've saved yourself seven dollars and change. Nuevo Cuban cuisine has a major outpost in the Gables, though it's not a nuevo place: Victor's Cafe, founded in New York two decades ago and imported south, features dishes like red snapper in crunchy green plantain crust.
In nearby South Miami, Two Chefs Cooking's Jan Jorgensen and Soren Brendahl apply Mediterranean touches to hearty fare that one appreciative critic described as "nouvelle bistro." In Coconut Grove, The Grand Cafe at the Grand Bay Hotel dazzles visiting celebrities with its upscale menu.
The seafood hot spot of the moment in the Coral Gables-South Miami area is Red Fish Grill, a onetime beach house in Matheson Hammock Park on tree-lined Old Cutler Road. On a cool spring evening, you'll think you've died and gone to Hemingway as you dine outside on delicate, pan-seared sea bass. Farther down Old Cutler, at the private Deering Bay Yacht & Country Club, fish with tropical flourishes star on chef Paul Gjertson's menu. Along U.S. Route 1, you'll find the area's best family fish house, the Captain's Tavern, with an ideal mix of both simple fried fish and designer seafood. Also on U.S. Route 1, near the University of Miami, is the southern branch of downtown Miami's Fishbone Grille, where Chef David Bracha does a delectable Bahamian-style whole yellowtail with pigeon peas, rice and Scotch bonnet vinaigrette.
South Florida's best seafood is found, not surprisingly, in the Keys. Upper Matecumbe Key, which includes Islamorada and is roughly ninety miles south of downtown Miami, has nearly thirty restaurants in its three-mile span. At the picturesque Morada Bay, chef Alex Kaulbach mixes tuna steak with black beans and pineapple in Thai peanut sauce. At Atlantic's Edge, chef Dawn Sieber bakes dolphin in phyllo dough with spinach and balsamic glaze and cooks spicy orange shrimp in dark rum. For the seafood purist, the Islamorada Fish Co. offers up standards such as conch chowder, crab fritters and the absolute freshest of fish, served in a basket with coleslaw and french-fries, for less than ten dollars. At Louie's Backyard in Key West, chef Doug Shook is following in the illustrious footsteps of Norman Van Aken, who brought Louie's to the forefront of the then-nascent Keys fine-dining scene in the 1980s.
Although neons and pastels are the dominant colors in South Beach architecture, The Tides breakfast atmosphere is enhanced by the facade's soothing off-white.
Astor Place, the bistro-style restaurant at the Hotel Astor.
Today, the region's emerging fine-dining destination is affluent Aventura, in the far northeast corner of Dade County. Aventura is home to Fish, which features a 20,000 Leagues atmosphere, a bustling raw bar, and such elegant entrees as grouper with creamy leeks, French lentils, and wild mushrooms. And at the private Turnberry Isle Resort & Club, chef Todd Weisz is serving the upscale clientele an upscale take on Floribbean.
Flash south along the coast and east across Biscayne Bay to South Beach, or SoBe, the so-called American Riviera, where the Art Deco revival fostered a revolution in tourism, nightlife, and dining. The Beach scene has a reputation for high prices and indifferent service, and some of that is deserved, but there's a high degree of glamour at work here, too. Take the Blue Door restaurant at The Delano, a blindingly white hotel in northern South Beach. The restaurant is a bustling, chaotic, super-crowded, see-and-be-seen spot—you might even end up sitting ten feet from Calvin Klein or Madonna. The Delano has competition in the swank hotel department in The National, its neighbor to the south on suddenly exploding Collins Avenue. Refurbished and reopened to much fanfare in 1997, The National is home to the Oval Room, featuring one of the city's most sophisticated menus. Ocean Drive, ground zero for the SoBe revolution, is more oriented toward fun than food these days, with the exception of chef Christophe Gerard's elegant Twelve Twenty at The Tides Hotel. Two blocks inland on Washington Avenue, chef Johnny Vinczencz's Astor Place may offer the best combination of food and service on the Beach, with a menu that's all about fusion, from a fantastic Caribbean seafood soup to a cold sushi-plate entree. You can also catch his food at his nearby casual diner, Johnny V's Kitchen. Farther south on Washington is China Grill, an outpost of the wildly popular New York restaurant. The food is pan-Asian, excellent and expensive, and the wait can be forty-five minutes or more on a weekend, even with a reservation.
The crowds are just as heavy a few blocks east at Nemo, the Schwartz-Chefetz team's flagship restaurant, where Schwartz matches fish with exotic greens and adds Vietnamese spice to an excellent beef tenderloin. Across the street is their budget house, the Big Pink,
where the camp factor is so high that you can get a bona fide TV dinner on a compartmentalized tray. The food is homemade, though, and good.
North of Fifth Street, Washington Avenue is evolving into a strand of nightclubs and clothing stores, but it is still home to the Beach's best Italian restaurant, Osteria del Teatro. By and large, Beach sophisticates have moved north to the newly renovated Lincoln Road, a pedestrian mall that spans the island from ocean nearly to bay. Much of the eating there is done outdoors, and on weekend nights during the season, the walkways are packed.
Outstanding restaurants abound, not all of them expensive, and fans of Italian are especially well rewarded. Rosinella's, a tiny trattoria on the East End, features excellent homemade pastas, sauces and soups, with a full-meal ticket of about twenty dollars. Trattoria da Leo, farther west, has a similar menu and a surprisingly sophisticated decor and clientele (don't miss the world's best house salad).
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